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Hazing at The Museum of Natural History: Method Actors, Steel Spines, and Vestigial Tales

(adapted from Chapter 3 of The Door-Man) I often take my grandkids to the American Museum of Natural History*. On Sundays. They have a blast; I suffer the collateral damage.        Looking into the eyes of another living person is surely a perilous affair, but too much time spent
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A Question of Answers: Dry “Wells”, Wooden Scrabble Racks, and The Quotidian Lacuna

One of the great skills I learned as a professor was knowing how to speak while thinking of what to say. It’s the dirty little secret that most, if not all, academics share. And it remains a secret because if we let that cat out of the bag (…or if a real cat got my tongue)
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Engraving Belly Buttons in Albrecht Durer’s Rain Forest: Black Holes, Adam’s Rib Stakes, & the Funiculus Umbilicalis

A number of folks have asked about the new novel that I’m working on…er, laboring over. It has a working title of Adam’s Navel and, as usual, it is ambitious and complicated (sorry, pace Martin Luther: here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God
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Why Bo Diddley Was Wrong about Book Covers: Druid Talk, Cato Maior, and Shakespearean Splinters

I am often asked about the descriptions of the natural world in my novels. Folks seem to like how I… “bring such places to life.” I avoid stating the obvious – that landscapes are already quite alive without any help from me; I’m just glad my writing doesn’t ki
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Crumpling Paper with Frank Gehry: Legos, Turntables, and Novel Building(s)

Wherein I answer the question always asked… Back in my days at Parsons School of Design, the faculty would play a little game when reviewing applications for admission to the architecture school. The first faculty reviewer who came across an applicant’s Personal Statement
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Lincoln Lincoln, BoBincoln, Bananafana FoFincoln: Name Games, Proust’s Echo, & The Medieval Thing

By now, some of you have begun wading through the stream of dramatis personae in The Door-Man. I appreciate it…and hope that you manage to keep your footing in the current. It is not easy when the characters drift across three generations; when they come to the surface in c
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Shape-Shifting at the Museum of Natural History: Rough Writers, The Timeliness of Cymbals, and Bad Homophones

Ok, I’m having my usual bit of fun here with disconnected facts. The “Bad Homophones” bit was a teaser, a bait and switch kind of thing…although I’ll bet any non-English-language-speaker misses the bait and still gets hooked by the swerving meanings of ou
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Ideating in Central Park: Fuel Tanks, Flotsam, and Hot Sparks at 141.8 feet

Saul Bellow once said: “People don’t realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.“ I say: Well, yes and no… Few would deny that we spend a great deal of time inside our heads (see Lyle Lovett in&
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Tai chi in the Valley of Dry Bones: Compound Lexemes, Hyphens, and Metal Hinges

Bones play a significant role in The Door-Man. No spoiler there; they show up in the first paragraph of the novel: It was shortly after the peculiar discovery at the Central Park Reservoir that I began dreaming about the men in my family again. About bones. That said, the story g
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Riding the Single Chair: Confessions of The Unsociable

Last week I wrote about Robespierre, The Incorruptible (Ruminations…01.03.12). This week, it’s Me, The Unsociable. Riding the Single Chair…sounds like it could be either a Zen kōan or something from Vātsyāyana’s Kama Sutra, don’t you think? I do. But here
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